City of Marlin —
Water and Waste Water Services

Client:

As a
publicly owned and operated utility, City of Marlin Water
and Waste Water Services supplies water and sewage treatment
services through 4 water filtration plants and 4 sewage treatment
plants to the City of Marlin.

The City
of Marlin Works and Emergency Services Department embarked
on a Best Practices Program to transform their Water and
Wastewater Services Division into a competitive public business.
The goal of the this program is to re-examine existing functions
and operations and to identify and implement "best
practices" that improve the delivery of services as
a business-driven, public utility. A focus on performance
assures that these practices are measured and continuously
improved.
Any performance management system provided would
need to provide at least these high level objectives:

Provide
information relevant to operators, middle management
and executives in both tabular and graphical
form

Provide
easy navigation tools to find the various pieces
of information needed by its wide variety of users

Accept
information in real time from process control machinery

Support
security control to protect sensitive information

Be
scalable to support large numbers of datapoints
(currently 3000) each entered on an hourly
or a daily basis

Be
configurable and modifiable by non-programmers

Solution:

A configured
performance management system based on Alacrity Results Management
(ARM) was implemented as part of the implementation.

The
system can be viewed at the operations level to analyze plant
process performance and at a management level to track overall
performance trends. These performance center "dashboards" give
utility managers and operators the tools for ongoing continued
performance improvement and are based on measures of efficiency,
quality, and effectiveness at each level of the performance
framework.

Result:

The system has
met or exceeded all the requirements. The
implementation (consisting of 8 major systems, including
ARM), provided the ability to increase efficiency:

To date, cumulative cost reductions of more than $65
million ($Canadian) have been realized and reflected
in the 2002 budget, and annual savings are expected to
reach $36 million per year upon full implementation of
the project. Cost reductions come mainly through reductions
in payroll, energy, chemicals, and parts.